Artist Stamps from Sally Wassink

I recently received some groovy artist stamps from  Sally Wassink.  Part of an on-going collaboration with the  Portland Stamp Company (check out more on their site).

Home from Vacation

After a few weeks of fun down in Mexico, I came home to a big pile of mail. It wasn’t just junk mail and bills, there was plenty of good mail art waiting for me.  The list includes Adrienne Mason’s layered collage, new mail from Argentina, a tattooed hand, an old wallpaper sample repurposed as a postcard by Jennifer Utter, and mystery food embedded and preserved under layers of tape from Pedro Bericat.  I particularly liked Punkie Ebert’s Yes We Do Care  flag postcard – in these times, it is challenging for Americans to feel patriotic about our country.  Punkie reminds us that we will keep resisting until we deliver ourselves from this disaster. Finally, some follow-up from the Beyond Beat show down in Venice that included a poster and a set of artist stamps. Below is the full list of what is shown in this post:   

1. Adrienne Mason– Canada
2. Punkie Ebert – California 
3. William Mellott– Taiwan
4. Torma Cauli– Hungary
5. Maria Quiroga – Argentina 
6. Kathy Barnett – Missouri
7. Jennifer Utter – California 
8. Pedro Bericat– Spain
9. Gregg Biggs – Museum of Unclaimed Ephemera – California
10. Asli Omur – California 
11. Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center– California

Don’t Call Me Shirley

An entire sheet of artist stamps arrived in the P.O. Box this month from San Francisco artist Sally Wurlitzer.  I immediately was drawn to the sheet of stamps from a pure aesthetic point of view.  And then there is the story that tells so much, much more.   From the text printed on the sheet:

Shirley was Kodak’s ideal in film processing.  She possessed the skin tone considered to be “normal” and against which all other skin tones were calibrated during film development.  Samples of Shirley were sent to all film labs in the form of “Shirley Cards.”  The original Shirley was an actual employee of Kodak, but no one knows what happened to her.  Over the years there were many other “Shirleys” who looked very similar to the original.  Eventually Kodak says they caught up with the times and designed a multi-racial Shirley Card.  This did not occur until 1995.

For more information, NPR did a story in 2014 and the Guardian explored the issue in a 2013 story.